What Chomsky and others never achieved was comprehensive semantics (useful mappings of the instantiations of grammatical language to the real world and to reaso

What Chomsky and others never achieved was comprehensive semantics (useful mappings of the instantiations of grammatical language to the real world and to reasoning), because semantics is AI-hard. LLMs are picking up the semantics from the mix of grammar and semantics they train on. They literally minimize the error of producing semantic grammatic sentences, which is the key thing no one in the old days had the computing power to do beyond toy environments. The domain of discourse is the entire world now instead of colored shapes in an empty room, and so semantics about reasoning itself have been trained which yields rudimentary intelligence.